Rendezvous regular Mark McDonald asked for fresh U.S. embassy stories. Here is an old one from back when America waded into Vietnam, China was a forbidding foe, and Cold War rivals could have easily blown each other off the map.
If a U.S. mission needed guarding anywhere, it was Kinshasa after the C.I.A. provided matches to set the Congo ablaze. Soviet spooks worked hard to discomfit America.
I dropped in regularly for updates on a nasty bush war, and a lone Marine waved as I breezed past. Often it was a guy with whom I’d done the clubs the night before along with diplomats and local luminaries. But no one else got stopped either unless something awkward bulged under a raincoat.
The embassy, exposed on a leafy corner, was colonial-charming, with a white-brick facade that could not stop a determined buffalo. Diplomats spoke in frank detail, and often showed confidential cables to trusted visitors.
A U.S. cultural center downtown was open to the street so Congolese could stop by to discover Time magazine and Tom Sawyer, theoretically triggering warmth for America.
In Nigeria, then mired in bitter civil war, the Lagos embassy was only a shade less freewheeling. When in a hurry, I’d bound up the stairs without a pause in search of the guy in charge.
By 1970, U.S. missions began to swell. I was once in Monrovia, Liberia, with a diplomat fresh from Washington. He nearly fell over when he saw the Executive Mansion.
The cigar-chomping president, William Tubman, had built a nine-story palace with the Temptations wafting from speakers along endless corridors. When the fountain out front was turned on, no one within a half-mile had water.
The diplomat saw the giant flag on top and stammered, “My God, is that our embassy?” Liberia’s currency was the U.S. dollar, and its flag was the Stars and Stripes.
Today, if Mr. Tubman’s palace had had Fort Leavenworth walls and an open field-of-fire perimeter, the diplomat’s question would be perfectly reasonable.
The change was clear after Ronald Reagan beat up Grenada in 1983 to distract attention from Lebanon. Before the smoke cleared, the Ross Point Inn, the best little hideaway in the Caribbean, was bristling with antennae and shielded by walls under a bed-sheet-sized American flag.
Let’s not even start on the billion-dollar mission in Baghdad.
These days, obviously, it is harder to get into U.S. missions. But worse, it is harder to get out. Diplomats live in cocoons, isolated from the societies they are supposed to penetrate.
Those old embassy exchanges helped reporters see a big picture, especially those who had parachuted in on a breaking story. We shielded our own sources, and diplomats protected theirs. And we each learned things.
My last of these visits was in Kuwait during the 1990s. The acting ambassador met me in a bare room, hands folded like a nervous kid. At each question, he glanced at his minder, a note-taking information officer. What troubled me most were the answers. In an exchange that lasted half as long as the security gantlet at the gate, it was clear the guy was clueless about Kuwait.
Courageous diplomats like Christopher Stevens are more vital than ever, but they don’t remain cloistered in a Fort Apache stockade. Those ugly monstrosities symbolize everything Americans believe they are not.
Real diplomacy is now done from Washington, and an embassy can be easily pared down to essential services. Even ceremonial functions have lost their luster. At those annual July 4th bashes, foreign dignitaries who line up to be poked and prodded miss that land-of-the-brave-home-of-the-free spirit.
No one can protect an “embassy.” Official Americans go home at night, shop, and send their kids to school. In a loony world when some zealot’s puerile film that looks like a Saturday Night Live spoof can create such havoc, it seems wiser to pare down to what is really necessary.